


nothing's going to harm you (not while i'm around)

by ryukogo



Category: Cookie Run (Video Game)
Genre: Adventure, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Childhood Sweethearts, Children, Exploration, F/M, Gen, based off a friend's headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:54:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24202405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryukogo/pseuds/ryukogo
Summary: Blackberry used to love adventure. 'Used to' being the keywords here.
Relationships: Adventurer Cookie/Blackberry Cookie (Cookie Run)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 41





	nothing's going to harm you (not while i'm around)

**Author's Note:**

> *blows a kiss to the advenberry stans* for u

It’s midday when she hears the sound of pebbles hitting her window.

She’d been waiting for Ghost Butler to show up with the day’s lessons when her sharp hearing picks up on the smallest of noises, like pebbles hitting glass or something to that degree. Eyes like dark amethysts narrow at the one tall window in her bedroom as she pushes herself and her chair away from her desk, the young girl’s doll shoes hitting the cool floor with little more than a whisper of a  _ thud _ . Blackberry was light for a young girl, and as quiet as a ghost - which certainly helped when it came to surprising anyone.

With a little bit of a struggle, she climbs up on the ledge of the window before unlatching it and swinging it outwards, peering outside curiously. While it was only the middle of the day, rarely was it ever obscenely bright in their section of the Primeval Jungle, the skies preferring to remain perpetually muggy and shrouding the area with mist. The ghosts in the area liked it that way - it made toying with visitors to the Jungle much more delightful.

Her palms, sitting next to her knees, graze against what seemed to be pebbles that didn’t belong on her ledge. She presses down slightly on the pebbles to get them to stick to her hand before turning her hand over and lifting it closer to her face to inspect them. Definitely pebbles - round ones too, like the ones from the gardens of the manor. They weren’t the jagged ones she saw beyond the gates of her ghostly home, so pressing them against her hand did not break skin.

Blackberry peers down again at the ground. Her room was on the second floor of the manor, and while the jump from her window to the bush wasn’t too high for a grown person especially with the bushes growing nearly under her window, for someone of her current size it was very dangerous.

She sees nothing of note, and shrugs, reaching over to pull the window shut again.  _ Must be one of the ghosts again. _

Blackberry turns around, and then is greeted by a very familiar cheeky smile.

“Hi BB,” Adventurer says, beaming.

Blackberry blinks, still trying to comprehend that he was here, before shaking her head. “How’d you get in here?”

“Window,” The boy answers casually, and Blackberry nearly palms her face, realizing she’d just let him in herself that whole time. “Funny story, actually. I almost fell back into the bushes climbin’ the wall.”

“You climbed the-!”

“Enough about me,” he interrupts, and Blackberry sucks in a breath and puffs out her cheeks in a tiny pout at being interrupted as he adjusts the straps of his backpack eagerly. Wait, had he scaled the side of her house with that on his bag?  _ What a dummy. Doors existed for a reason _ . “Is Ghost Butler comin’ in?”

Her brow knitting, Blackberry smooths out her pinafore with a hand as she answers promptly, “He’s going to be teaching me lessons again today. It’s the middle of the day, after all. He always teaches me things at this hour.”

“Blaugh,” Adventurer wrinkles his nose, making Blackberry giggle quietly into her palm. She knew for a fact that Adventurer hated being cooped up in a room listening to some boring lectures or another from his family’s tutors - even if he liked Ghost Butler, there was only so much the boy could take. He was always antsy, itching for an adventure no matter how big or how small - and none of the adults could really stop him. His mom certainly didn’t - but then again, she supposes, Dr. Wasabi wasn’t really a good basis for this sort of thing.

“Why are you here anyway?” Pause. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but you know Ghost Butler’s going to take you back to your mom when he finds you here.”

Adventurer’s eyes briefly flash with something akin to mischief. Blackberry knows that look well. “I’m here t’take ya on an adventure, BB.”

“Is that why you have your backpack with you?”

“Mm-hmm,” Adventurer confirms proudly, briefly jumping up and down, his bag bouncing with each jump. “It’s just a tiny li’l adventure, I promise. T’ain’t gonna last more than an hour or so - I’ll getcha back here ‘fore Ghost Butler even notices you’re gone!”

“I don’t know…” Blackberry hums, tapping on her chin as she rocks back and forth on her heels. “Where are we adventuring?”

“It’s a real cool cave I found while runnin’ ‘round the forest,” Adventurer answers, tugging on his hat. “But I can explain a lot more later when we’re already goin’ there. You comin’?”

Blackberry nibbles on her lower lip thoughtfully. “... I want to, but… I kind of want to learn today’s lesson from Ghost Butler.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Mystery Jewels.”

“The Mystery Jewels? Pssh. I can tell ya all ‘bout them myself!” Adventurer puffs up proudly, and it’s then that she remembers with a smile that her adventurous friend, on top of living for the thrill of the adventure and the joy of discovery, had a very selective sort of memory when it came to treasure and precious stones. It made sense in retrospect that he knew about the Mystery Jewels even without prompting. Adventurer didn’t enjoy studying unless he wanted to learn about the thing himself. “So are ya comin’ or not? ‘Cause if you are, we can use my rope to climb on down your window!”

Blackberry squints at her windowsill. “... Are you sure that’s safe?”

“Am I awesome?” Adventurer bats back.

“Debatable then.”

The face that Adventurer makes in response makes her burst into laughter. “Wow. Okay. And here I was gonna be askin’ my bestest adventurin’ buddy out again to check out the cool place I found with me. Guess I gotta ask Minty instead-”

“Waitwaitwaitwaitwait, I’m going, I’m going!” Blackberry yelps, waving her hands around. Mint Choco was nice, but Adventurer was  _ her  _ best adventuring friend, not his! Mint could go play with Cinnamon instead, he liked Cinnamon. “But we better go now before Ghost Butler notices!”

Adventurer’s grin shines with the light of a thousand suns before he hurriedly hooks his lasso around the window latch and swings it open, tossing the rope down before sliding down the rope and landing into the bushes below. Soon after he gestures that it’s safe for her to go, Blackberry glances back behind her once as she climbs up on her windowsill.

“C’mon, BB!” Adventurer shouts out at her.

Blackberry, for a brief moment, reaches into the pocket of her dress. She feels the wax of her little candle, and is immediately reassured.

Surely Ghost Butler wouldn’t mind she skipped out on lessons just this once, right?

With her dress ballooning under her, Blackberry slides down the rope, eyes shut - until she knows she’s landed with a  _ pomf  _ on the bushes next to Adventurer. Secure in the fact that she was in the bushes with him, he tugs on his rope and pulls it back to him before looping it repeatedly and hanging it on the hook on his shorts.

“Y’ready?” He asks once he climbs out of the bush and holds out a hand to her.

Blackberry sticks out her tongue, but takes his hand anyway. “To adventure?”

“To adventure!” Adventurer cheers, and she can’t help but cheer along with him.

* * *

The entrance to the cave is like a pitfall trap of sorts.

Blackberry’s experienced pitfall traps. Adventurer’s sister, Special Forces, liked building pitfall traps as a means of practicing how to build trenches in the future. She wasn’t sure  _ how  _ she thought pitfall traps were anything like trenches besides the whole digging part, but she supposes she couldn’t begrudge her enthusiasm for the activity. Special Forces poured her heart into each and every trap, after all.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Blackberry says, staring down into the darkness. “How’d you even climb out the first time?”

“Pure muscle power,” Adventurer flexes once, prompting Blackberry to shove him lightly. “I’m kiddin’, I’m kiddin’! There were rocks down there that I climbed up on, kinda like wall climbin’ stuff. It was pretty easy, actually! So we definitely have a means of comin’ back out again later. I’ll go first if you’re scared.”

“‘M not scared,” Blackberry huffs as Adventurer begins the descent. He disappears into the darkness for a while in silence, and for the briefest of moments she thinks he’s fallen too far when she sees the flame of his lantern illuminate his face from where he was standing, smiling up at her and gesturing for her to follow.

_ Well. Here goes nothing. _

Mindful of her dress and pinafore, Blackberry hops into the hole, hand snagging onto a rock on the side halfway down before she continues her descent carefully, hands and feet searching for purchase on hand and footholds until finally, finally, she’s standing next to Adventurer in relative darkness, the only light between them being the lantern he held.

Blackberry hums thoughtfully before pulling out the candle in her pocket. “Can I?”

“Huh? Oh, sure-” Adventurer lifts the little lamp he carried around during adventures, and Blackberry tilts the wick of her candle towards its flame, allowing her own candle to be lit. “There. Now we both got a light.”

Blackberry liked her candle. It was a special candle - one of many made especially for her by the ghosts of the manor. Unlike other candles, it would never glow normal orange flame - only a soothing but eerie lilac, unique to their home. She’s pretty sure some magic or another was involved with the fire, but she wasn’t  _ too  _ concerned with it yet. It was pretty, and useful. That’s all she cared about at the moment.

“Did you explore this place at all the last time you went here?” Blackberry asks as Adventurer leads her by the hand through the tunnel. Looking around, it’s only a bunch of roots sticking out of the dirt, but it was clearly a cave system judging by how neatly packed the dirt was all around them.

Adventurer shakes his head before realizing that she might’ve not seen that, so he says instead, “Nah. I found it, and then said I wouldn’t go explorin’ it ‘thout you, so I went t’getcha first. That way we can both be experiencin’ it for the first time, right?”

“That’s fair,” Blackberry concedes. “Thanks for getting me, even though you didn’t have to.”

“Of course I hadta! You’re my best friend an’ my bestest adventurin’ buddy!” Adventurer sounded so scandalized that Blackberry giggles again, squeezing his hand in reassurance. “Besides, you’re th’only one I really trust with the cool stuff. That’s why we’re the real adventurers. Nobody coulda found and explored this place like we can!”

“Yeah…!”

It’s quiet for a few minutes, the boy still holding tight onto her hand as he moves his lantern around in front of them to check every now and then for anything unusual. With her candle in her free hand, she too lifts it to light up the walls around them to check. Some of the dirt seemed more compactly packed in than the others, while others straight up just looked like bricks inlaid in the soil. Some looked like stone, even, weathered by the roots of the trees above them.

“Addie,” Blackberry says after a few moments, stopping in her tracks. When he looks at her, she lifts her little candle towards the walls, and points at it. “Those don’t look like dirt walls anymore.”

“...” Adventurer squints, and then nods decisively, continuing to walk and taking her along with him. “They ain’t dirt no more. That’s stone. There’s gotta be somethin’ at the eeee _ heeeheeend-!” _

Blackberry digs her heels into the ground, her grip on Adventurer like a vice grip as the boy nearly topples over the edge of…  _ something _ . Daring to lift a foot, she pulls him away just in time, and with a gasp he stares at where he’d nearly fallen down.

She dares to go near the edge, and looks down.

“... Yeah, let’s take the stairs,” Blackberry eventually says as her eyes land on a staircase just out of their line of vision to the right. Holding out a hand to Adventurer to pull him up, it’s her leading the way this time as the two children wander deeper down into the strange cave they’d discovered. The ‘stairs’ as she’d called them weren’t even stairs, actually - they were just stones jutting out of the sides of a sort of wall that  _ resembled  _ a staircase.

Adventurer was having the time of his life, looking around and gawking openly at the open space they’d wandered into. “ _ This  _ is what’s underneath the Primeval Jungle?!”

“Must be where all the ghosts come from,” Blackberry says idly, looking around for ghosts. The area was eerily quiet - perhaps all the ghosts that had lived down here had migrated to her house or aboveground already? “Considering that there’s a high chance a lot of people already fell to their deaths like you almost did.”

Adventurer snorts at the idea. “Like a fall could kill me.”

“It could,” Blackberry says matter of factly. “But nothing’s going to hurt you, of course. Not while I’m around. I’m the smart one between the two of us.”

Adventurer smiles an easy going smile, one that makes the young girl feel at ease. “Ain’t gonna contest that. But don’tcha count me out, y’hear? Nothin’s gonna hurt you either when  _ I’m  _ around, y’hear me? ‘Cause I’m the courageous one.”

“Sure,” Blackberry rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling because she knows he’s not lying in the slightest. “Anyway, come on. I think I see something shiny down there.”

“Right behind ya!”

Of course he was. He always was right behind her, if not right in front of her. That was how they worked, the two of them - one in front of the other, to protect either way.

Blackberry hops off the last ‘step’ with a delicate, airy grace - just as Adventurer lands next to her with a much louder thump, his backpack bouncing as he goes. Together, hand in hand, the two approach the looming thing in the middle of the large platform they’d landed on, and lift lantern and candle upwards to look at it.

The large lion statue glares down at them with sparkling ruby eyes.

“Whoa,” Adventurer says, his voice echoing off the walls around them. “Ain’t that a big kitty.”

Blackberry sniffs. “And it’s still more behaved than Cheesecake’s cat.”

“It’s a  _ statue,  _ BB, of course it is.”

“And that says a lot and you know it!”

The two giggle to themselves at the jab at their friend before Blackberry’s eyes catch sight of something inscribed on stone in front of them. Carefully she lifts her candle to the inscription and reads, “‘Take not away the treasure of this room, or you will most certainly face your doom’. I don’t  _ see  _ any treasure though, do you?”

Silence.

Blackberry looks at her friend. “... Addie?”

“... I think it means th’ eyes,” he says, pointing at the eyes of the lion, and when she looks harder she realizes that the eyes were actually  _ jewels _ , embedded into the statue and reflecting the light of the flames in their hands. “That’s gotta be the treasure, huh?”

“We shouldn’t touch it,” Blackberry warns. “The inscription said not to take it away.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t say nothin’ bout gettin’ a closer look. Help me up?”

With a groan, Blackberry shakes her head. “You’re heavy!”

“Then I’ll carry you up!” Adventurer suggests.

“What makes you think I wanna?!”

“If you do I’ll give ya all my desserts for a week.”

“Make it two.”

“Done!”

Blackberry’s eyes glitter dangerously, and with a grin Adventurer bends down in order for her to step on his shoulders before standing up in a wobbly fashion, hands on her ankles. They’d done this many times before to reach many things one of them couldn’t reach on their own, usually with Blackberry on top since Adventurer  _ was  _ too heavy for her. Still, it took a while before they gained their bearings enough for Blackberry to focus once more on the statue.

Her free hand ghosts against the lion’s muzzle, admiring the way it was sculpted. It really was a pretty statue. Ghost Butler would’ve liked it, or maybe even told her all about it. Ghost Butler was smart. But Ghost Butler wasn’t here - he didn’t even know they were here, after all.

Blackberry’s hand reaches out for one of the lion’s jewel eyes. It kind of reminded her of her pendant, actually, but a lot more faceted. Hers was a smooth-faced jewel. She liked her pendant, it was pretty and round - this one was more like… some sort of polygon? She thinks that was what Aloe called it.

The instant she brushes her fingertips against the jewel, the floor rumbles beneath them. With a yelp, Adventurer loses his grip on Blackberry, and she tumbles on top of him, the two of them sprawling to the ground as the ground continues to shake violently.

And then the lion statue begins to move.

“Oh no, oh no, we gotta go, we gotta go -  _ now! _ ” Adventurer shoves Blackberry off of him to stand up before pulling on her hand, making her stumble to her feet. The lion statue come to life roars, making the ceiling and walls tremble around them, and with a faint sense of horror Blackberry realizes that the roars were making the entire thing cave in.

She feels her feet moving. She isn’t asking them to - it’s more instinct now, the need to survive allowing her to follow and keep up with Adventurer the best she can. But doll shoes and pinafores were not designed for running long distances in mind - especially not on little girls in stubby pigtails holding lit candles and calloused hands of little boys with undying thirsts for adventure.

Blackberry lands on her foot wrong once on the way back to the exit, and she cries out in pain, letting go of Adventurer’s hand.

Big mistake. The crumbling ground that had been chasing their heels reaches her, and she screams as she falls, and falls, and Adventurer screams too-

\- until her dress catches onto a root and her palms scrape against rough rock, and the poor girl terrified out of her wits is too shocked to really cry, too shocked to realize that her hands have been scraped raw like her knees whenever she and Adventurer went sliding down the banisters of the manor.

Small hands fumble for the rope hooked on his belt. He couldn’t afford to clam up now, right?! With childish abandon he tosses the loop down, and the instant he knows for certain the loop has found its way around around Blackberry he tugs, and tugs, and tugs until he’s pulling her out of the way of the crumbling ground, and it’s a lot of work for a little boy who only knew adventures and fun and games with his best friend who liked to put things in order and who talked to ghosts like they were friends.

The crumbling ground does not stop for them, however. Adventurer realizes this, and pulls Blackberry along. If he felt the scrapes on her hands, he does not point them out until they’re safely out of the hole, and until he’s brought her home through the front door to a steaming ghost butler of a father figure.

They’re scolded harshly by Ghost Butler. But Blackberry barely processes it, really - not when the adrenaline finally wears off and her legs give way under her, making her pass out in the middle of the hallway in front of Adventurer and Ghost Butler.

* * *

She’s not the same, Adventurer realizes numbly, when he comes to visit again a few days later.

Gone is the same thirst for adventure they used to share that used to sparkle in her eyes. When he mentions their adventure, she smiles, but it does not reach her eyes. When he treads around the topic of the cave in, her body tenses. When he brings up her scraped hands, she cries, and Ghost Butler shoos him away to play with her younger sibling Cinnamon instead.

He doesn’t like it when she cries, but he understands why she does. Their adventure had hurt her in a way he didn’t completely understand yet, but would when they were much older, much smarter. All he understood was that he was the reason she no longer loved adventure like he did, and that she would no longer be there by his side while exploring.

It hurts, but Adventurer understands. It’s his name, in his nature, to adventure. But Blackberry didn’t have to if she didn’t want to anymore. He’d rather she was safe at home if that was what she wanted, because that at least meant she wasn’t going to cry anymore.

But she doesn’t stop following him into caverns. Doesn’t stop following him into caves, into treacherous waters, into dangerous jungles. The years pass by, and yet… she still followed him, always.

Oh, she never followed him openly, at least not often. He never asked her to come with him on adventures, never let her know where he was going, only that he was going out and that he’d be back in a few hours, or days if it was a long expedition. But he knew she was there - Blackberry held a distinct presence that he knew by heart, and from childhood to marriage and beyond, he knew her like he knew his own heart.

She was always there, looking for him. Looking out for him. Finding him, and saving him from trouble. And perhaps that was always going to be the way they worked, because Blackberry couldn’t sway him from his thirst for adventure, and he couldn’t sway her from her desire to follow, even if she no longer loved it like he did. He thinks he understands, at least, why she had to follow even when he’d implicitly begged her not to.

If she’d been in his position, and he in hers, he would have done the same.

Blackberry held no love for adventuring. Not anymore. But she did love Adventurer, just as much as he loved her. As he would go to the ends of the earth for her, so too would she exert as much effort to protect her the way she knew best - even if that meant following him into dangers even he didn’t know of beforehand.

And perhaps that was what mattered, in the end.


End file.
